Social and Solitary

Tobias Wolff, whose most recent book is “Back in the World: A Collection of Short Stories” (Houghton Mifflin), was awarded the $5,000 PEN / Faulkner prize for his book “The Barracks Thief” (Ecco Press). This excerpt from his acceptance speech was originally published in Vanity Fair, September, 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.

William Butler Yeats spoke of his poetry as the social act of a solitary man. I’ve never heard a better description of the effort to create something out of language, the paradox of being most social when most alone. Language is our meeting place, the sea we all live in. When I watched my children learning to talk I had the sense that they were not so much learning language as being claimed by it, taken into its arms as if it were another parent, and so it is. In the arms of language they will join the family of man. They will learn what has gone before, and they will learn what is left to be done. In language they will learn to laugh, and to grieve, to be consoled in their grief and to console others. In language they will discover who they are. It is the common ground of our humanity.

But those who take language for their work must accept the purest solitude as the first condition of that work. Language does not bend to the collective will. You have to come to it alone. And even then it may be slow to favor you. But you try anyway. And you keep trying. And if you are lucky, perhaps after all this trying you will be given something to take away with you. But you aren’t allowed to keep it. It belongs to everyone. It joins the common store.

The irony is that most writers, most writers of my acquaintance anyway, are sociable men and women, not at all the kind of people you would suspect of wanting to shut themselves up for hours at a time, day after day, year after year. Who knows why they do it? They probably don’t know themselves. But I suspect a reason. My guess is that the unearthly joy of those moments when they are visited with favor, when words come alive in their mouths, makes any temptation to use their lives otherwise seem pale and not worth thinking about.

And the rest of us feel the power of those moments, too, because the living words are handed on to us and give shape to our lives. They bring us the truth about ourselves, about who we are and where we have been and where we are going. Their power is so great that one of the first things any tyrant does is to bully writers into silence, or murder them, or put them in camps, or force them into exile, where their voices can’t be heard. But the true power belongs to them, and in the end they will be heard. That is why we honor Ovid over Caesar, Solzhenitsyn over Stalin . . . Shakespeare over any king. So it has always been, and so it will always be.